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Topic: Fire In the Lake (Read 6791 times)

Anybody play the 2nd Edition using the bots for solo play? I read that they were significantly improved from the original game. Just curious if it's fun and playable solo, even though I really have more games than time already. Thanks.

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We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. George Bernard Shaw

Anybody play the 2nd Edition using the bots for solo play? I read that they were significantly improved from the original game. Just curious if it's fun and playable solo, even though I really have more games than time already. Thanks.

I have the 2nd edition with the bots and have been dying to play it. Haven't even unboxed it fully yet. So many games so little time...

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Forgive me my old friend. But I must use all my experience...to get home.

I have been thinking about getting this game for a while and decided last night to pull the trigger. Of course I came here to do a search to see if anyone played it and lo and behold, there is this thread right on the front page.

How is Fire in the Lake and would you recommend it? I'm not a huge wargamer like I once was but I still enjoy learning new systems.

Yep! -- one of GMT's few restrictions on porting the games to Vassal and TTS (etc.), is that the random-roll charts for solo play not be included or linked to. The RULES for solo play can be linked to, since those flowcharts are included in the rules released by GMT themselves (usually in what's called the "playbook" which also includes more details on the event cards.)

While I can't do it this weekend (being gone to New Orleans to see some of Dad's family), I would be glad to set up a demo play of Fire in the Lake for Tabletop Simulator sometime soon, if there's any interest.

The game has no secret information (well, any such is secret to everyone, like the upcoming event cards and players' plans!), so the game can even be played over-the-shoulder, in a pinch, following someone along on Steam, without having to own TTS.

(To be a little more accurate, there's an optional secret point-draw bag which gives each player a random 0 to +2 points for application during game-victory checks.)

What you'd definitely need is a microphone that Steam can access. (The TTS voice chat is very-much still alpha, I think, and last time I checked it outright crashed my game. Steam is hashy but not that cancerous! We can also do Discord or Teamspeak or something.)

About to be gone from Grogheads until Sunday night at the earliest; but a note about my video AAR series (and the screenshot/written AAR before it): I played through both of those games totally misunderstanding the rule about marching across roads/rivers (i.e. across LoCs).

Insurgent forces in COIN games, namely the NVA and VC in FitL, are less mobile than the government forces, so they can't travel along roads and waterways as easily. But they do cross LoCs without any problem.

In effect, LoC's don't count as separate spaces for insurgent forces (those with March capabilities) when the forces are crossing the LoC. Or shooting artillery over the LoC -- my misunderstanding of the rule led to a weird artifact of what I thought was the game design, where NVA artillery could not shoot across a LoC because they could only shoot into adjacent spaces, and the LoC of course is a "space". (The only "space" that isn't an "area", areas being where bases can be built.)

This also resulted in a more usual fault, where insurgent forces could only March onto or off a LoC during a March operation. That's true if trying to March along a LoC, but when Marching across then there's no problem. By contrast, Government forces (the US and ARVN in FitL) can not only "Sweep" across a LoC in one move, but also along the LoC. (This all assumes the LoC is free of opposing forces, of course, which would otherwise stop the movement.)

So the two AARs end up showing some very goofy movements thanks to my misunderstanding! Fortunately, thanks to another rule -- which I did understand correctly -- much of the time this wasn't a problem: towns (the little black named dots) are nulls on the map connecting areas and LoCs together, so don't count as spaces. That means nothing can be put in towns (unlike in Cities), but it also means that forces can pass through (indeed must pass through) from one space to another without any hampering.

Thus, in many cases, insurgent forces could simply March around the intervening LoC -- or even simply shoot artillery "around" the LoC! -- by going through a connecting town spot. This provided an inadvertent workaround for my misunderstanding of the LoC adjacency rule, so that effectively my misunderstanding didn't affect gameplay all the time. But sometimes there were still odd situations.

Any future AARs I do will definitely fix this problem. As will any demos I run next week or whenever.